All parts of the body which have a function if used in moderation and exercised in labors in which each is accustomed, become thereby healthy, well developed and age more slowly; but if unused and left idle they become liable to disease, defective in growth and age quickly.
—Hippocrates
This morning, as I walked into my local barre fitness studio, I saw a woman with the body of a thirty-year-old, a face that looked about fifty, and a head of thick, gray hair. Huh? I couldn’t stop staring. She was on a bicycle, which she handled with confidence, as if it were a favorite article of clothing, and then she casually locked it to a rack with the air of a seasoned cyclist. Bike helmet still on, the woman walked briskly into the studio ahead of me.
I know I’m not supposed to compare my body to someone else’s, but I couldn’t help myself; she was my height but leaner with better muscle definition and no “thass” (my kids tell me that you want to have a sharp demarcation between your thighs and ass; when they merge—giving you a thass—it’s a telltale sign of aging). She headed to the front of the room (I prefer the back row). During class, I noticed that her handheld weights were heavier than mine, and her planks and push-ups were “full form” (barre lingo for on her hands and feet, not modified on the knees). She took every challenge thrown down by the instructor. Impressed and inspired, I had to investigate.
Sylvia is seventy-one. Her healthspan score is 74, above average. She’s always been an athlete, although the rest of her family has little interest in fitness. Her resting heart rate is in the fifties. She is an omnivore who eats a lot of fruits and vegetables, and she eats almost exclusively at home. When she does go out, she orders a salad, a soup, or fish. She hates cars and doesn’t own one, preferring to walk or cycle everywhere. Last weekend, she completed a metric-century ride (a bike ride of sixty-four miles—or a hundred kilometers—in four and a half hours). Before and after a long ride or workout, she sleeps nine hours per night. When she trains fewer than two hours in a given day, she sleeps a minimum of eight hours and naps, if time permits, for anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes.
Sylvia is a publicist and former marketing executive, still working full-time. In fact, she came up with the slogan “A woman’s place is on top” for a T-shirt that was sold to fund the first women’s ascent of Annapurna in the Himalayas in 1978. The intrepid female mountaineers sold more than ten thousand T-shirts, which enabled them to make the climb (Sylvia was invited to join them but had to decline). The slogan remains a fitting description of Sylvia and her personal style of aging slowly.
I explained to her that I was writing a book about aging, and she started peppering me with questions, her bright, alert eyes boring into me. She told me the secret to staying young was to remain open to new ideas and be curious. As Sylvia has done for several decades, you can age more slowly once you understand the 90/10 rule about your genetic code. So let’s prepare for the best epigenetics possible. I’ve gathered the most proven approaches that will help you age more slowly and stave off infirmity. We’ll start by calculating your current healthspan score.
Take the Healthspan Quiz
In order to slow down aging, you need to measure your current aging process because what you measure improves. Additionally, it’s important to start with a baseline. Considerable debate exists about the best way to measure aging, and there’s not much consensus. Geneticist and Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn says it’s telomere length measured in white blood cells, a test done by specialized labs. Dr. Oz suggests his RealAge Test, a unique calculation of a body’s health age, created by himself and Dr. Mike Roizen. They developed it back in 1999 and it needs to be updated based on the latest science. Many antiaging researchers rely on handgrip strength—your ability to squeeze your hand and bear weight, such as when you’re hanging from a pull-up bar. Luigi Ferrucci, director of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging, uses handgrip strength to track aging and inflammation in a large cohort of healthy people he’s been following since 1958.1 Ferrucci also uses a blood marker that measures inflammation, interleukin-6 (IL-6), which your immune system makes; it’s associated with 807 genes related to aging and mortality, and IL-6 levels rise as you get older.2 Another system suggests that measuring the blood level of C-reactive protein, an indication of inflammation in your body, may be the best method for predicting mortality risk.3 But none of these measurements is easy, convenient, and cutting edge. So I created my own, the Healthspan Score.
In order to take the quiz efficiently, you will need the following tools:
• Computer or tablet, if you prefer to perform the quiz online
• Measuring tape (in inches or centimeters) for recording your waist circumference
Option to take the quiz online: www.HealthspanScore.com.
Your Healthspan Score identifies the top priorities in several areas related to aging. And you’ll begin to learn what to do about those. Along with doing the following quiz, I suggest that you take a before photo of your body and a close-up of your face (especially your eyes and skin) so you have a benchmark for your starting point. Here are the baseline measurements affecting your healthspan that you need to record prior to the test:
1. Resting heart rate
2. Waist circumference
3. Weight, height, and BMI
4. Fasting blood sugar (most mainstream doctors test this on everyone by age forty-five)
Healthspan Quiz
Take my healthspan quiz to determine the rate at which you are aging and set your baseline for calculating improvement. For each question, choose the answer that best describes you currently. Write down the number of points for each answer in the blank line provided. At the end, tally the subtotal for each section and the grand total (your Healthspan Score) in the space provided at the end of the quiz.
Interpretation
You now have a baseline measurement of the most important factors determining your rate of aging: demographics, lifestyle, stress, exposures, medical and family history, antioxidant status, connectedness, and brain function. What’s next? Use the table below to interpret your score. You will calculate your score again after the seven-week protocol and then periodically in the future (I suggest every six months) to make sure you’re on track to lengthen your healthspan. The rest of this chapter will help you get ready to take back control of the aging process and your health. In the future, if your score ever drops, look closely at the areas where your score decreased and then review the correlating protocol/rituals in this book.
| Score | What it means |
| < 40 | Very Low Healthspan. You are aging excessively. In addition to starting the Younger protocol, see your doctor for help and accountability while you slow down your aging. |
| 40–49 | Low Healthspan. You are aging fast and are at high risk of a compromised healthspan. You don’t have time to waste. Start the Younger protocol as soon as possible. |
| 50–59 | Below-Average Healthspan. You are aging moderately fast, but this protocol will help you age more slowly. |
| 60–69 | Average Healthspan. Your healthspan is in the average range, but we have a lot of work to do together. |
| 70–79 | Above-Average Healthspan. You are doing a lot right, but we need to address several gaps. |
| > 80 | Excellent Healthspan. Perform the Younger protocol to reinforce the good practices you now have in place and establish them as habits, looking for the small tweaks that will improve your score. |
Why These Measurements Matter
These measurements indicate how your genes are performing. Every one of them affects your genetic expression and helps highlight, even prioritize, the functional medicine solution. Each section reflects a key aspect of aging, from disease risk to oxidative stress, and therein suggests where you need the most help. For example, if you did well in most sections except lifestyle, then that’s where to give more focus in the seven-week protocol. Each chapter of the Younger protocol will improve your healthspan, even in areas where your score is already on track. If you eat an antiaging food plan but skimp on sleep, then we need to address that. If you’ve honed your lifestyle but you have relatives with Alzheimer’s disease, then chapter 11 (“Think”) will be more important for you.
One measurement alone doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story. As an example, let’s look at heart rate. My husband has a resting heart rate of forty-nine because he’s an athlete who excels at every sport. My resting heart rate is around sixty, on a good day. That means he is more efficient at pumping blood from his heart to the rest of his body than I am. It’s part of the muscle factor. The key to slowing down aging is slowing down your resting heart rate. Endurance-oriented physical exercise lowers your resting heart rate and reduces your total heartbeats over twenty-four hours. Additionally, endurance athletes have better balance in their nervous systems than nonathletes. They rest and digest better but can kick it into high gear and perform when needed.
The health improvements in athletes are not confined to heart rate; they extend to beat-to-beat variability, known as heart rate variability (HRV). Your HRV is the pattern of your heart rate—if you have a resting heart rate of sixty, you might think that’s one beat per second, but that would be very low HRV. You actually want variability between the time of each heartbeat; for example, the first gap between heartbeats is 1.00 seconds, and the second is 1.02 seconds, and the next 1.05 seconds, and so on, in order to indicate good HRV.
I think of HRV as a measure of the flexibility of your nervous system, and more flexibility is better. A certain level of variability is considered healthy and advisable. The variability results from several factors, including external (lifestyle, behavioral, and environmental) and internal (neural reflex, neural central, hormonal and other humoral influences).5 Think of a low resting heart rate and increased HRV as being associated with longevity.6 (You’ll learn more about how to measure HRV in chapter 7.) However, HRV is just one measurement. An athlete could have a high HRV and yet sleep too little, have a family history of Alzheimer’s, and work full-time in a factory where she is exposed to toxins forty hours each week. That’s why your Healthspan Score is an aggregate measure that doesn’t rely on a single factor to reflect your rate of aging.
Test Your Vision
It’s common but not unavoidable for people over forty to need glasses. Usually the problem is presbyopia, which is when you experience blurred vision during near work, such as reading, looking at your cell phone, sewing, knitting, or working at the computer. Even if you’ve previously had other types of eye problems—nearsightedness, as an example—you may find you have blurred vision even when you wear your usual glasses or contact lenses. You may need to hold the object you’re reading at arm’s length in order to see it more clearly.
Presbyopia results from aging, unlike nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism, which tend to occur in childhood or young adulthood. The most likely explanation for it seems to be that proteins in the natural lens of the eye begin to age, leading to gradual thickening, hardening, and stiffness. Additionally, the muscle fibers surrounding the lens get older, and what you notice is that you have more difficulty focusing on an object up close.
Presbyopia rates are rising, mostly because the population is growing older. Furthermore, the amount of near work people do has risen; just look at the exponential uptick in the use of cell phones, handhelds, and laptops.
Test your vision by downloading an eye chart from the Internet and checking each eye from a specific distance, just like an eye professional. See the Resource section at the end of the book for apps and other ways to measure your vision easily.
What can you do about it? I’ll give you specific exercises in chapter 9, but before beginning the Younger protocol, take a digital detox once a week for twenty-four hours, meaning you ban cell phones, computers, TV, and handheld devices. For every forty-five minutes of near work, take a fifteen-minute break. More daylight when performing near work may help. Plus, spend more time outdoors, where you have to focus on seeing objects at greater distances.
Help Wanted: New Paradigm
People in their sixties, seventies, and eighties often ask me if it’s too late to age gracefully, but what cutting-edge age researchers know about the innate intelligence of the body is that it keeps flexing, adjusting, and adapting to the right cues until the day a person dies. So it’s never too late to deactivate the time bombs in your cells and boost your healthspan.
Regrettably, we live in a world that is at odds with our DNA. There’s a mismatch between genes, life span, and our dominant culture—the societal norms that guide educational, marital, work, and retirement choices. Currently, societal norms assume that you exponentially decline starting around age fifty and then retire ten to twenty years later when you are no longer productive. Yet our genes offer a distinct alternative. Maximize what your genes can do by improving your environment, regardless of age, as Sylvia in my barre class has done.
To accomplish this, we need a new paradigm about aging so that we live longer, live better, and feel more vital. A paradigm shift requires that you reconsider many aspects of aging, from failing vision to how much time you sit during the day to your life purpose. Why not prepare yourself for a better quality of life for a longer amount of time? Start thinking about the benefits of being able to pluck out worn-out cells as if they were rogue chin hairs. That’s the benefit of implementing the Younger protocol.
Keeping Up with the Icarians
Let’s get ambitious so we can match the achievements of long-lived residents in places such as Monaco, Icaria, and Okinawa. Not only do they live longer and with great health to the end, but they also have a far better quality of life than we do in the United States. Consider the people of Icaria (sometimes spelled Ikaria), a mountainous island in Greece. I suspect they will outlive the Kardashians!
Icarians live ten years longer than most Europeans; they run up and down their hilly landscape daily, at all ages and in much greater health. Named after a figure in Greek mythology, Icarus, who died at an early age because his artificial wings fell apart when he flew too close to the sun, the island ironically boasts the most ninety-year-olds in the world, with one in three people there surviving to ninety. It has been dubbed “the island where people forget to die,”7 but I prefer the nickname “the island where people don’t lose their minds,” as the population is almost completely devoid of dementia and depression. Icaria is more isolated than other Greek islands (it’s about a ten-hour ferry ride from Athens), so it’s been spared most of the trappings of tourism, including fast food and a fast-paced life. As a result, the island even now is a great laboratory for a different way of life, one that happens to be associated with a long healthspan.
While no single factor explains longevity across the board, it’s fun to peek inside the typical day of an Icarian to see how he or she achieves such a long healthspan.8 Most of the data collected on Icarians has been gathered by the University of Athens, the Harvard School of Public Health, and journalist Dan Buettner in his investigations for National Geographic to study the globe’s longest-lived cultures.9 Consider these factors as we start to cover the steps of your own Younger protocol.
• Wake up naturally, without an alarm clock, and don’t put on a watch. Icarians don’t wear watches and have a relaxed attitude about time.
• Bathe in curative hot springs. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, considered hot mineral baths curative. And in Europe and Japan, doctors widely accept them as a form of therapy for knee pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia, high blood pressure, eczema, and other problems. Natural hot springs include various minerals such as sulfur, thought to improve nasal congestion; calcium and sodium bicarbonate, believed to enhance circulation; and salt, presumed to help digestion.
• Eat lots of fish, greens, and other fresh vegetables. Even compared with the standard Mediterranean diet, Icarians eat more fish and fresh vegetables, especially wild greens such as dandelion, fennel, and horta (a cousin of spinach)—more than a hundred and fifty varieties of local greens grow wild. They rarely eat meat, usually once a week or less, and liberally drizzle olive oil as a condiment on food at the dinner table. They eat six times more beans than Americans and a quarter of the sugar. Most people have access to a family garden and livestock such as goats. But locals stress that it’s not the food alone; it’s enjoying the food in combination with conversation with loved ones.
• Know your neighbors and socialize often with friends and family. Strong social connections improve health and longevity. Icarians are famous for their open-door lifestyle and broad invitations to visitors to join them for a slow, friendly meal.
• Consume raw, unpasteurized goat’s milk. Icarians consume unpasteurized goat’s milk and use it to make yogurt and cheese. It’s known to be hypoallergenic compared with cow’s milk and does not bother most people with lactose intolerance. While goat’s milk is seemingly healthier than cow’s milk for you, it’s the raw part that may matter most for your health. When milk is pasteurized, it kills the probiotic Lactobacillus acidophilus. You need Lactobacillus acidophilus to make B vitamins and inoculate the gut with healthy bacteria.
• Walk like a goatherd, and garden. The rugged mountain terrain of Icaria requires a mini-workout each time someone leaves home. Sixty percent of Icarians over ninety are physically active, compared with about 20 percent elsewhere. According to visitors, it’s hard to get through the day without hiking at least twenty hills.
• Drink wine moderately. Locals explain that their wine is pure, nothing added, no preservatives. They drink two to four glasses per day. When consumed with plenty of fruits and vegetables, wine nudges the body to absorb more flavonoids, a type of plant derivative shown to benefit your health.
• Fast intermittently. Most Icarians are Greek Orthodox Christians, and their religious calendar calls for intermittent fasting about six months of the year. Prior to an Orthodox feast day, they don’t eat for eighteen hours. Occasionally restricting food has been shown to slow the aging process in mammals.
• Nap each afternoon. Icarians’ standard practice is to nap after lunch for thirty minutes, at least three times a week but sometimes daily. Did you know that napping lowers your risk of heart disease by 37 percent? I didn’t know that either, but the mechanism seems to be related to lowering stress hormones and resting the heart.
• Eschew retirement. Icarians have a relaxed attitude about getting to work in the morning, but their work gives their lives purpose and meaning. They do not believe in retirement and view work as a way of life, not something separate from it. To them, it’s all sacred time.
• Drink a thick mountain herbal tea brewed from marjoram, spleenwort, purple sage, rosemary, oregano, chamomile, dandelion leaves, artemisia, or a wild mint called fliskouni. Many Icarian herbal teas act as diuretics, which flush waste out of the body and lower blood pressure by removing excess sodium and fluids. Icarians enjoy their mountain tea as a tonic at the close of day.
Functional Medicine: Stop Sitting on the Tack
Before we improve your healthspan by making room in your life for the epigenetics that will keep you healthy well into old age, just like the people of the Greek island of Icaria, let’s address the key problems that steal your youth. In standard medicine, the convention is to apply prescriptions to address symptoms rather than to treat the root cause. The problem with this approach is that you may feel better temporarily, but your medical condition keeps progressing and you age faster. Sydney Baker, M.D., one of the early practitioners of functional medicine, used to say that if you’re sitting on a tack, the solution is to find and remove the tack, not to treat the pain. In functional medicine, the goal is root-cause analysis so that you tune up the biology, reverse the medical condition, and feel better in the long term. In fact, several key functional medicine recommendations will benefit nearly everyone and decelerate aging; those recommendations are part of the protocol that you will begin to learn about in this chapter.
Ten Conditions That Steal Your Youth
I’m obsessed with what makes you old before your time—the conditions that cause inflammaging. How do you know if you have inflammaging? You feel stiff, slow, tired, and can’t remember why you walked into a room. Here’s a quick list of the most common problems that contribute to inflammaging and shorten your healthspan.
1. Getting fat
2. Sitting too much
3. Taking certain medications, like anti-anxiety pills or even antihistamines (like Benadryl)*
4. Eating too many carbohydrates and processed foods
5. Losing muscle (no longer building strength and regularly using muscle fibers)
6. Sleeping less
7. Lacking vision and purpose
8. Getting insufficient vitamin D
9. Feeling stressed out
10. Isolating socially
*Antianxiety pills such as Valium, Xanax, and Ativan were shown in a recent study to raise the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by more than 50 percent. Further, people who take Benadryl for sleep or allergies should reconsider, if they can remember—the Journal of the American Medical Association just published a study linking frequent and long-term use of anticholinergic drugs like Benadryl with dementia.
Since the Younger protocol is based in functional medicine, the protocol addresses the ten most common root causes of accelerated aging by focusing on multiple genes as well as their interactions with one another and with your lifestyle, including your diet, hormones, toxins, stress, omega-3/omega-6 balance, vitamins and minerals, allergens, sleep, and exercise. Lifestyle factors affect the accumulation of free radicals and other damaging molecules, mitochondrial dysfunction, hormonal decline, telomere damage, and, finally, inflammation, or inflammaging (that unfortunate combination of progressive inflammation and heightened stress response that leads to faster aging).
The Younger Protocol Prerequisites
Before moving onto the details for the first week of the protocol, you need to meet the minimum three essentials of a long healthspan, or the prerequisites:
1. Sleep a minimum of six hours per night. If you don’t meet this prerequisite, start spending an extra thirty minutes in bed. Sleep cleans out the garbage of your body. It’s like a power cleanse. In chapter 6, I’ll show you how to optimize your production of melatonin, an important antiaging hormone that controls more than five hundred genes.
2. Avoid processed food. If it didn’t come out of or walk on the ground and isn’t recognizable as a plant or meat or fish, avoid it. Of course, processed foods fall along a continuum: macadamia nuts are less processed than macadamia oil. The point is to avoid foods with five or more ingredients that you cannot easily pronounce, or fake food that comes in a box with a long shelf life. A vegetable bowl with chicken is okay, or flax crackers that contain simply organic flax seeds, apple cider vinegar, sea salt, and herbs. A jar of pasta sauce with added sugar is not.
3. Exercise twenty to thirty minutes four days a week. Yes, that includes walking! Ideally, start to notice your heart rate at rest and while exercising, before refining your approach in chapter 7.
These three prerequisites need to be in place prior to week 1. Your body will not be able to benefit from the other aspects of the protocol until you establish these foundations, even if it takes you a few days to a few weeks to make them a habit. For people who are already performing these basic foundational steps, the prep phase should require only a day or two to get the supplies you need for success in week 1.
Define Your Why
Next, you need to articulate your why. You have a belief about aging that I want to unearth. This belief is your motivation to slow down aging. It’s a touchstone that’s probably what made you buy this book and it can be cultivated while you’re developing new habits that will keep you young. It’s your motivation to act, even when it’s difficult or inconvenient. Your why is far stronger than willpower or following the protocol because you think it’s a good idea. Your why is deeply personal and will sustain you over the long term.
My why for de-aging is that I want to live a long life with my husband, hiking our favorite trails in Point Reyes National Seashore, having long conversations that I cherish, watching our two daughters grow up into fabulous, interesting women, and taking care of our future grandchildren should the girls choose to have kids.
My husband’s why is different, just as your why may not resemble mine. At his current age of fifty-six, he wants to augment his healthspan so that he can always be highly physical. David wants to be vital so he can still fish as he gets older and be able to turn his neck like a normal person, rather than like the former football fullback he is. He thinks it’s a shame that so many people build financial equity over the decades leading up to retirement, but when retirement age comes, they lack health and are physically bankrupt. They have no health equity. He wants health equity. He needs to reduce the tightness and inflammation that he feels in his back, which drives him to need a chiropractic adjustment several times per month (and probably relates to his twelve years of playing tackle football).
He wishes to wake up in the morning feeling rested and happy to be alive, not in pain. He wants to eat more lemon-ricotta pancakes and to drink the most amazing gluten-free India pale ale (the one that hasn’t been invented yet. Damn!). He wants to dance with our daughters at their weddings. He can’t imagine he’ll be alive to help me take care of grandkids, but if so, he’s game. He’s less optimistic than I am about aging, not to mention six years older. Nevertheless, his Healthspan Score is quite high, especially for his age.
My friend Jo Ilfeld is forty-two. She’s married with school-age kids like me; we met in a moms’ group. She describes her why in this way: “I want to see how my kids turn out. And I want to retire and do all those things I don’t have time to do now. Or if I don’t retire, I at least want a marriage without kids for a while. Oh, and I want to have great sex until I die!”
Prep for Your Protocol
When I first started writing books, my friend Jo asked me to offer two tracks: one that gives the minimum actions to achieve results and one that gives all the advanced stuff. If you’re a skier, it’s like a green run versus a double-black-diamond track. I’m giving you both. Here are a few tips.
• If you want to keep it simple, just perform the actions marked basic rituals.
• If you just want to know what to do and don’t want to get lost in the science, skip the science sections in chapters 5 through 11 and go straight to the protocol sections.
• When you perform the protocol again in the future (I recommend twice a year), add an advanced project.
• If you want a greater challenge, perform the basic rituals plus the advanced projects.
• All the prep emphasizes the basic track, with a few notes for those with the time and energy to follow a more advanced track. Ready to get started? Me too.
Before Week 1: Upgrade Your Body with Food
• Complete Healthspan Quiz
• Go shopping
• Buy or make fermented food10
– Sauerkraut
– Cultured vegetables (my favorites are beets, turnips, and cabbage)
– Kimchi
– Coconut kefir
• Stock up on healthy fat
– Coconut oil, preferably unrefined and expeller-pressed
– Medium-chain triglyceride (MCT) oil, a very efficient type of oil derived from coconuts that gets rapidly converted into energy for your brain and body because it doesn’t require a stop at the liver for processing. (You don’t need bile acids to digest it, so it’s easier on your GI tract.)
– Grass-fed butter (made from cows that graze on a grass pasture) or ghee (clarified butter)
– Chia seeds
– Flaxseeds
– Avocados
– Marine fats such as an omega-3 supplement, wild-caught fish (salmon, cod, halibut), krill oil
• Purchase clean protein and have about three to four ounces of animal or plant protein at each meal, which will help switch on your longevity genes. Ideally, eat meats only from animals fed in their natural habitats: pastured chicken and grass-fed beef, buffalo, and venison. Limit pork and processed meats such as sausage.
• Set your goal of low and slow carbs to decrease inflammation and glycation. Stock up on sweet potatoes, yams, yucca, and quinoa.
• Make or buy bone broth. It’s rich in collagen, a protein needed for skin, teeth, and nail health. Your body’s production of collagen declines with age, leading to wrinkles, neck waddles, and weak joint cartilage. For our family, making bone broth is the most convenient way to get collagen into our food plan. If that sounds disgusting, just start with chicken bones, filtered water, and a slow cooker—the slow cooking breaks the collagen down into gelatin. You’ll be amazed. See the Recipe section at the end of the book for fish, chicken, and beef bone broth.
• Stock up on organic red wine if you drink alcohol. Yes, it’s better than white wine, beer, or cocktails (more on this topic in chapter 5).11
• Pick up a bottle of berberine. Blood sugar rises with age, starting at fifty, and berberine is one of the supplements proven to help you normalize serum glucose.12 Not only that, berberine will cool inflammation in your body, lower cholesterol, assist weight loss, and behaves like an antioxidant.13 I recommend it if your fasting blood sugar is greater than 85 mg/dL. Take 300 to 500 milligrams once to three times per day, which has been shown to activate an important enzyme called adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase, or AMP, nicknamed “metabolic master switch.” Talk to your pharmacist if you take medications (such as certain antibiotics) to make sure it doesn’t interfere with drug metabolism. Beginning in day 1, take berberine every day, before or during a meal and throughout the protocol. Add in milk thistle to increase efficacy. Stop after two months to allow liver enzymes to normalize.14
In the first week of the protocol, you will learn the counterintuitive but easy-to-follow rules related to food, drinks, oral health, and supplements that will defuse the time bombs in your cells. The focus will be on the actions you can take to create “magic wands” that enable the body to produce enzymes, hormones, and other substances essential for slowing down the aging process. Recommended resources to help you along the way are in the appendix at the end of the book. Ready to learn the daily choices that help you defy genetic tendencies and fight disease?